Here we are a few days into the coronavirus chaos in Michigan. Bars and restaurants closed, and so we’ve had to cancel our monthly networking event for the first time in 13 years… but our guest couldn’t have possibly be more timely as we dive in to discuss remote working, doing things effectively while remote, how to keep yourself on track and rolling…
C3 is at: https://c3techadvisors.com/
Live from the quarantine studios here at podcast Detroit. This is the it and the D show. We made it all the way to episode three 39 guests this week include Jason and Taylor. They are from C3. We’re going to be talking about worker mobility and remote office technology solutions. And the best part is that we didn’t even plan. It wasn’t planned like this. No, like that’s one of the C3 that’s one of their core focuses and uh, I thought what a great time to, I’ll talk about it. So we’re gonna uh, you hear that sound that those are the VPN engines humming across the U S a as long as they’re not running through the West coast Azure platform. Right. I love how they call it a Brown out. We’ll be talking about that in a lot more. Dave, you may fire when ready. Welcome back. Thanks for hanging out with us.
Hopefully you’re somewhere safe in your homes. Barricaded in bubble wrap. How else can you be right now? Good point here you are listening one and only it in the D show. We are broadcasting live here in studio one in podcast, Detroit in-person in beautiful Royal Oak, Michigan. This is Bob the sales guy. That is Dave the geek. Randy. I do the Twitters is doing the Twitters, find us online it in the d.com. And I was a smoker’s cough, not a rotavirus cough fight. Fight a sunlight ideality.com and it give us a like on the socials and subscribe to us everywhere. Fine podcasts are so that’s the only place you’re gonna be able to find this cause ain’t no meetups happening anytime soon. Folks. Uh, thanks to uh, I, the situation as it is, I blame the virus. Blame governor Whitmer blame whoever we want to blame.
All bars and restaurants are shut down for anything but takeout and carry out, uh, for at least two weeks until at least at three April 5th. Oh yeah, we are. Uh, and so, yeah, no, we’re not doing our meetup, uh, this week at the cozy lounge. It has been canceled. We are sorry. Um, it is not our fault. We are victims. This is literally the first time in 13 years, uh, that we will not have an event, uh, in Metro Detroit for the month or in Harbor for that matter. Well, they had the one a couple of weeks ago. They had one. Yeah. And then theoretically if it ends when it’s supposed to, they’ll still have their next one. So it got kicked around today on LinkedIn, um, about us having a virtual event and while I go, Ooh, good idea. Google Hangouts and I talked to cause some guys at work and they’re like, and that’s not a bad idea then I thought a logistics, it’s a horrible idea of having 50 people in a Google hangout going, hi, my name is Belle and I worked for this company and we sell stuff and we’re awesome.
Hi bell. It’s like a, you know, like an AA meeting, but it’s high bill. Um, so we’re, we’re, we’re not going to do a virtual meetup. I, here’s the thing, if you, you know that we’ve got 8,000 members in our LinkedIn site and we got like 2,800 on our meetup site. And then we’ve got our website. If you need to post your resume, post your resume posted job posted, job posted intro. If you guys want to have private Google Hangouts or like, Hey, you know, Philip A. Day of, of meeting new people, um, we’re going to leave that up to you. It’s kind of like how we’ve done our networking events. Right. We’ll, we’ll, we’ll provide the venue and we’ll leave it up to you to, to, to do what you wish. Like I’m not going to lie, I have always adding a message board, a component onto our site just cause I don’t want to monitor it and I don’t want to deal with it.
And we do deal with enough deleting things on LinkedIn when people posting webinars and sales staff. But yeah, so we are a, we are in the throws of a Mike Corona [inaudible] but Hey, I’m speaking of networking events by the way. Um, we have been using Vista print since pretty much we’ve started I think, Oh seven or whenever, whenever we could buy it for its first couple of rounds of cards. Absolutely. We, um, you know, it was always, uh, we always, it was, it was the easy button for us building business cards. It was basically, um, pick your colors, fonts, designs. They had pre done designs. We did our own, we could put our logo on the back. We just decided to do two logo ones where I put it in the den, podcast, Detroit, we used to have two cards. Um, but Vista print has been kind of running this and we always told people that were coming to our events.
Hey, just put your name and your title and your email and your phone number. You know, it’s easy. Yeah. Um, but Hey, you know, like I said, you can use their designs, you can do your own design. You pick the paper stock, the style, quantity, it’s right for you. Um, you can even upgrade, you can do stuff like rounded corners. You can be unique. Um, and now you can get your cards for free with economy shipping. Um, they actually use, uh, carefully selected inks and responsibly source paper socks too. And it’s honored percent guaranteed. If you get it and it’s not good, you get your money back or you can over, they’ll make it right. Do us a favor. They want you to be able to own the now in any situation, which is why our listeners are it and the ETI team, the D listers will get free shipping on all business cards, any style, any quantity.
Just go to Vista, print.com and enter promo code it in the D for free shipping on all business cards, any style, any quantity. Is this for a limited times the OMA now@vistaprint.com promo code it in the Dean, right Randy? I still owe your cards and saw the ones that Dave made, but they’re the wrong ones. He didn’t put his number. Yeah, no, no. John just took the ball and ran with it and didn’t ask if it was supposed to be PD or it in the D and E J D he did it wrong. It’s all good. We’ll make her, they’re still cute. I forget. Love them cause it’s at least Randy’s title is putting the gay and engagement. That’s all I wanted. I would refute it as cute. I was like, I was like, Oh shit is Randy saw that? Then Randy left. I go, okay, fine.
It’s like, Oh my God. He laughed. What I said I was going to have them done that way. I had them done. I was going to say, I’ll go talk to him about this. Um, yeah, no. So, uh, yeah, we, we are in the throws of, uh, whether it’s, you know, you want to call it coven 19, you want to call it coronavirus. You want to do whatever the hell you want to call it. Um, we are neck freaking deep in it right now. You know, here’s the thing, everyone’s been talking about this like beating it to death. If I listen to talk radio on the way to work, um, right now, you know, half are more than, I want to talk about this in a minute from a technology standpoint, but a half our company’s working from home, but uh, you know, as it turns out, that meeting really could have just been an email.
But I always, right now I’m at the point where I’m like, I would hate to see happened if the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor again. Like the stores are destroyed and when I mean destroyed, I mean it’s worse than like black Friday and they’re giving away dollar TVs. Like everything is gone. People are buying year supply of toilet paper because I didn’t know this virus gives you the shits, one person cops and then 30 people shit themselves. Right. But like then I’m like sitting at home now go, I’m going to like questioning our stock like die, have enough poop paper. Like are we going to be okay? You know, do we have ramen noodles? Like you know my kids are home now. So it’s like are they going to be able to eat? And it sucks because everybody else’s doomsday prepping kind of forces you to because you can’t rely on there being toilet paper when you need it.
So you’ve got to go stock up, right? No, I’m not going to, I refuse, I, I’m just, I’m not, I’m not going to be that guy. Like, I’m not cause all you’re, all you’re doing is you’re screwing a other people and B, the stores because now you are throwing their inventory control systems wildly out of whack. And so when this stuff does start to settle down, I mean you’re going to see some great deals on toilet paper and hand sanitizer, uh, probably meet, um, you know, when, when this stuff settles down because they’re going to be so overstocked, they won’t know what the hell to do with it. Cause now they’re, well, that’s the thing I don’t understand. Like I understand if you have a over like how sales and inventory and all that stuff matters. Now you’re getting all this like for the next four months, erroneous are getting.
Yeah, you’re getting it. You’re getting outliers. This isn’t the sales right now. Yeah. It’s kinda like, um, Oh my God, we gotta talk about this too. Um, she’s as Christ. I don’t Michaels, I don’t care what you’re doing to combat the coronavirus Chuck E cheese hat. I don’t care what you’re doing to cry. Say that. I could have, I’ve gotten a hundred of those. I’ve gotten way more than that. Vastly underestimating the number that I’ve gotten. Top ones like I don’t care. Harbor freight, I don’t care. I don’t care. Shit I bought from you tend to it like how does Michael’s even have my email address? I use yours when I buy wire frames. That’s right.
Which is dumb stuff like I don’t care. Like I assume you’re wiping shit Dallas twice now. The restaurant’s saying what they’re doing now. I was like, you weren’t sanitizing tables before him. I’m convinced it’s dude, it’s an ad campaign. It’s companies that you probably haven’t done business with in a long time and they’re using these emails as reminder, Hey, we’re here. Hey, we’re here. Hey, we’re here. Did you know what LinkedIn turned into? Oh, I saw a remote workers software. I said, VPN licenses. Guess what? If you act now, you get 90 days for you. For me, just the PO is going to come at day 91 I want to bend over backwards dry like it turned into, I swear to God, LinkedIn turned into a frickin like that’s why I sent you the skeptical. The Futurama, like not sure if actually cares about people or wants to blow out their Q1 number like, and I’m sending it to like all my business friends, like all my sales rep friends that are like, Oh, we’re totally, what makes you say, look dude, look at how well that escalated quickly.
Like how, how rapidly things escalated here. So like we had a call with, so Detroit shipping company, we had a call with the owners of the Plaza and all the restaurant owners on Friday morning. And the general consensus then was, you know what, we’re taking care of things yet. We’re going to cut our occupancy in half to 250 just to keep an eye on stuff. Um, and but by and large, it’s, do what you want to do. We’re going to be good if you, the restaurant owners or whoever feel like you have to close, go ahead and do so, but we’re staying open. Then you had, so I went down, I went, went really quick from a half occupancy to nothing. So then I also then, so Friday night, I’m downtown. Um, there were nine people at, at Detroit chiming company. I was running, I ran a show there at 8:00 PM.
There were nine people there. That’s Friday night, Friday night, that doesn’t happen. I drove by temple bar. There was one car outside. This is the bartender. I went to Hamtramck. They’re not bad. I mean there’s like maybe 10, 12 people at whiskey in the jar, um, Saturday night. So Saturday night I’m sitting at the bar at the apparatus room, which is where I rented a Courtney. Hi Courtney. Uh, cause she said she was going to listen to me. Um, and I’m sitting and there’s literally four people in the apparatus room at five o’clock on a Saturday. Good. God doesn’t happen. I don’t make so court, like, how’s, how’s this affecting things? Like how are things, she’s like, dude, she’s like, the bar’s pretty much dead. Like it’s, it’s all, you know. And I heard, you know, I told you I ran into a pipe and Brock on Friday night and he was, and he’s, you know, worked for a distributor and he’s, Oh yeah, all of downtown Detroit is a ghost town, like Hamtramck’s doing okay.
But all of Detroit is a ghost town. So I mean, yeah, the one thing I forgot to say in the intro, and I’m going to say no is I, you know, I don’t say hearts go out cause I mean you don’t need my heart. You need my money. But to tell everyone in the service is busy right now, not right. Um, well the, the, some of them are setting up Venmos. Um, but like, you know, I, I feel for ya, um, I hope everything gets worked out quickly, but everyone in the service industry, I don’t care what you’re doing. Um, I know people that like, um, Sherry, she’s a photographer, got everything canceled, substitute teachers, well, school’s canceled. There’s people right now that are, um, you know, uh, I don’t know. Like I said, I hired a rug of their life got ripped out from underneath them.
And I, and I, I just hope things, uh, right themselves. So that’s when I wrote that post Saturday was, Hey, for the love of God, the service industry is dying right now. Like if you arrested his restaurants, prefaced it by saying there’s more restaurants than you think that are going to close. So they’re like, you know, I promised, I said, Hey, as long as you’re not in one of the high risk groups and you don’t like regularly, go around people in the high risk groups, get your ass out, go hit that restaurant that you’ve always wanted to go to, that you have never made it to. I assure you, you will have the best surface you will ever have in your life. And the most attentive wait staff you’ve ever seen in history, if you go, go hit that neighborhood, you know, local bar that you’ve always, you keep driving by and you’ve never gone to just go for a drink or to just get out and tip like the staff is somebody you have the world’s worst crush on because that’s what they need to help make up.
We, uh, we did, we, uh, had a family birthday and instead of going out to the restaurant, we had everybody come over to the house and yard to take out, um, from someplace local. I mean, you know, we’re not going to go out or anything, but it’s all, you know, best I could do well and by and large, like everybody like agreed with me and it was really positive way. A couple of people that were telling me I was being irresponsible and they were telling people to go out and I’m like, dude, if it’s even if people go out right now, so this was so Saturday, so like I said, apparatus room. So then I went to hopped over to temple bar, one person, literally one person in the bar other than the bartender DSC, there was two people there, the largest, and I have to like four or five different places.
Saturday night, the largest crowd I encountered was it smalls, Bob smalls, Saturday night thirst wave industrial is not dead night. It’s packed. There were 10 people. Oh my God. That’s the biggest crowd I encountered. 10 people. That’s the, that’s the GoTo. Yeah, it’s pack then. Jeez. But I did see something, a, I guess in my career, I’ve never seen, um, you know, like I told you, we, we decided at work, um, last Thursday that we’re gonna move to Citrix desktop cause VMware rising views wonky and not everyone has laptops. So we have a lot of, you know, basically everyone, uh, doesn’t have, there’s only about a thousand people. The company out of 5,000 have laptops, right. Rest or desktops work at the office, no work from home, no business continuity plan that, you know, that we ever had. Um, basically eyes, basically a team of people. Um, I’m going to call them the 300 from the, from the damn movie King qinglian itis and his crew basically stood up a Citrix environment in four days.
Wow. Without sleep that it was, it hummed to today with no errors. Uh, I think we had one peak like 1700 concurrent users. Oh. Like I’ll never impress you. Everyone that was around basically including the vendors like this. This is like a three month lift and you guys dropped this thing in full ways. Like I’ve literally the people, I’ve never, I’ve seen people, I saw people falling asleep walking, like closing their eyes and like having to go hold onto something, um, like seven monsters to get through the night. Like insane. I said, the other thing I posted is like, I’m having a lot of flashbacks to Y two K right now. You know, cause I do, I mean I remember all of the stuff leading up to Y2K where, Oh it’s, it’s not that bad. It’s, it’s all media hype. It’s the odd ETA. And then Y twoK hit and it wasn’t a big deal.
It was like, Oh, it was all media hype. It was stupid. No dude, it wasn’t a big deal. People doing that busted their ass to make sure that it wasn’t an issue for you. You know, come midnight. And that’s so like, I’m, I’m hopeful we’re making those same joking comments about this nonsense six months from now. Well here’s, here’s the, here’s the two takeaways from this, right? And you could, you could, you could either it was media hype and it was bullshit. Or the precautions that we take now made it media hype and bullshit. Right? Like it, you know what I mean? You can’t have it both ways. And like I said, so what we got to stay home and read a book and hang out with our family like, and not watch sports for a couple of weeks. You know what, it might be good for you.
You know what I mean? I mean, that was kind of the premise of the shining and that didn’t work out now, but it’s been, it’s been meme, it’s been glorious meme. Um, they’ve been nonstop memes coming through. Um, my personal favorite is there’s a, there’s a Twitter handle and it’s like day two without sports and it’s like found a young lady sitting on my couch yesterday. Apparently she’s my wife. She seems nice. Like her favorite color is yellow. Who the hell has a favorite color of yellow? Right. But like there’s like the one, the one my favorite one. It’s some artists on Instagram, but it’s the coronavirus toilet paper shortage alternatives. And there’s eight of them and it’s everything from, uh, visit your local hand car wash and they’d stick in his butt out the window, bare ass water slide. And then the escalator had rail and the guy’s got his ass on.
But like literally it’s not like a, they will modern problems require modern solutions. My one favorite one was a will Smith and it was the I am legend, but it said, I am going to Costco. Yeah. Literally it’s been nonstop dude. Shout out to all the people God like, you know, it’s like I said, we don’t, we don’t understand social media. We do not that, that we’d never do. We never will. We never have, um, you know, we post stuff about free jobs. We post like, you know, stuff that makes us laugh. Um, and it’s usually the stuff that makes us laugh that goes like super viral and things go crazy. Dude posted that thing about helping out local restaurants while they’re struggling. Now, last I looked, it was like at 170,000 on the it and the page and up almost 50,000 on the podcast Detroit page.
Right. Like there was just that many people sharing it, like trying to get the word out to help people. And that’s really, really F and cool. I mean, it’s phenomenal. Granted, you know, it’s kind of a moot point now four days later. But I, um, hopefully it had some effect. God love my wife. She’s the best, which technologically she’s not, uh, not enough. Not there yet. Um, one day right now she’s not, never going to be, but she was like some funny pictures she showed and she goes and she’s like, Oh my God, it went viral. I’m like, babe, no. Like the, you shared it with like three people at work and you showed it to them on your phone.
Um, but then the one, the one that got me and said, I’ll, I’ll admit that I did not have monkey gang war on my coronavirus bingo card. Wow. Did you see that video? Yeah, the video is insane. If you want, look up. Um, monkey gang war in Thailand. Basically the tourists used to feed the monkeys there. I dunno what kind of monkeys they are. They’re like, there’s small Brown ones that, um, but now they’re like basically one, one of them gets food and the rest of them go are going nuts. Like it’s, it’s, I’ve never seen it like it, like there’s training like in the middle of traffic. So I know we’ve got our guests calling in soon. Um, one of the things I really want to make sure we get out there is if you guys are not paying attention, um, Comcast is really stepping up and doing a lot of good things for people during all this chaos.
Number one, if you’re already subscriber, um, they have nuked all the data caps. Uh, I believe for the next 60 days there shouldn’t have going to sit in the front two longer towards shut up. Just let it be a good thing. Uh, so turn on your torrents. So exactly. So your data caps are gone. Um, they’ve lowered, uh, they’ve made internet essentials free, uh, for at least the next 60 days. Uh, so if you’re not familiar with internet essentials.com, uh, basically if you’ve got a kid on like free or reduced lunch programs, that kind of stuff, you get free high speed internet, uh, into your house, go do, um, they’ve, uh, free wifi, as I say, the, uh, the ex affinity wifi network open and available to everyone, which is everywhere. By the way, if you ever leave your wifi open and drive around, it hits everywhere.
Yup. Uh, so definitely worth taking a look at ’em and, and seriously, I mean, clearly thanks to Michelle for shooting that note over. Uh, but yeah, they’re doing a lot of really, really, really good things right now. No, exactly. And then, you know, we had a bunch of, uh, you know, the of the last things that could ever happen, um, that we wanted to happen is as people are moving to the cloud VPNs and all that good. [inaudible] um, Azure, um, basically, uh, there was a, they called it power problems, um, the Brown out at West central, they called it a Brown up. I called out the West central region. Yeah. Um, but yeah, that’s, um, when, like I said, especially with us, um, we’ve put all of our, uh, VMs into Azure to, to stand up Citrix and we’re like, why is it down? Why is it down?
The claws house walls go down? Well, the cloud went down. Um, but you know, it is what it is. It’s a thing. Um, you know, and, and we talked about this right at the end, uh, of the opening segment last week, the whole Corey Feldman thing. So as, as expected that that did not go well. Um, uh, they blamed it on hackers, uh, but know that the live broadcast over the internet did not happen. Did he get suicided yet? Uh, no, not yet. Guys called out. We called out Bob Saget and Charlie sheen. Everybody’s like, that guy’s a lunatic. People that he’s already talked about before. That’s what it was. It was nothing new. No new information there whatsoever. So nobody’s really sure. You’re like Bob Saget, eh, like he’s not calling like, he’s not like, you know, it’s not like some Matt like directors, like Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, you know what I mean?
If it was someone like that, like, Hey, this guy did this to get me, you know, for me to be in lost boys or you know what I mean? Then it’s a thing. But like you just dropped Bob say and you don’t have a story behind it, eh, whatever. Um, but Hey, we are going to take a quick break. We’re going to be back with a Jason and Taylor from C3. This is the it in the D show. Hey, we’ll be right back. Hey, welcome back. Episode three 39. This is the one on the it in the D show, broadcasting live here in studio one with our, uh, we have our, with our Purell hand sanitizer and our wipes and our disinfectants and our sprays in our face masks. And this is Bob the sales guy and we have none of that. No, don’t lie to people.
You got a bottle of water. And for me, I’m a sales guy. That’s Dave to geek rainy to do the Twitters is doing the Twitters. Find us online it in the d.com because we are it in the D and you, you still aren’t. Hey for, we dive in with the capital one Quicksilver card, you earn unlimited 1.5% cash back on every purchase. Everywhere. That’s unlimited. 1.5% cash back on everything you buy and unlimited really means unlimited. With Quicksilver, there’s no limit to how much cash back you can earn. Capital one, what’s in your wallet? Credit approval required capital one, bank USA at a, uh, we were, we were just talking about all the memes that we’ve been getting back and forth before we jump in with Jason and Taylor. Um, Ray just posted, uh, the kid out here to clean up the poop in my yard, just realized don’t have a dog hashtag out of TP. That’s, that’s outstanding. Hey, I know, I know. On a serious note, um, w we actually, this is like the most amazing time where we’ve had, uh, on a topical, uh, topic. Did I say that right? Topical topic, you know, Hey, you know what, I read in the USA today, today, today, but we’ve got Taylor’s actually in studio. I’ve got Jason on the phone from C3. How Jason, how you doing buddy?
Good, good. Am I the a hundred color? Did I win?
No, you want a chance to be on the it in the D show? We appreciate you not coming in here with your cough. Uh, thank you for being cognizant of that.
Yeah. I didn’t want to be patient zero in the, you know, radio studio one over there.
Every time Dave cops, I have to remind people it’s a smokers coffin. It’s not actually a, it’s not Corona. Um, but Hey, uh, this is, uh, is this your second or third time on the show? I forget.
This would be our second time on it.
Yeah. So, and then we made a joke, I don’t know if you were a hearing listening to a lie, but we’ve been making a joke that every salesperson in town is salivating at, uh, selling VPN licenses and that free 90 days of working from home. And we’re like, do you really care about people or are you just trying to hit Q1 quota? How are you doing?
Okay,
no, I’m feeling good. And it is a very common conversation. LinkedIn is just becoming this big commercial for everyone. Like, Hey, you know, I, I can do WebEx too and I can do Z scaler and, uh, just trying to facilitate these remote from, uh, home users and there is a real need for it. But, you know, at the end of the day, you know, well, in my position with C3 and with Taylor over there, you know, we’re, we’re trying to tackle bigger, we’re trying to help companies with bigger problems, even though, you know, Romo road access is serious, there are better ways or there are other ways that you can tackle that.
So I guess let’s, let’s dive in right there, because here, you know, here’s the dilemma. I’m sitting here, you know, I own a business. I need to send a thousand people home. I can do VPN, I can do remote desktop, I can do zero trust. I can do, um, you know, whatever. There’s probably 10 other things I can do. What, what I guess what’s best for who? Like who fits in what box. Does that make sense?
No it does. It does. And at the end of the day, that’s our job. That’s what we’re here for is to help businesses evaluate that ever changing landscape, that portfolio of vendors that say they can do everything under the sun, right? And really give cloud companies, arm them with the information to make a really educated decision. So you know, you talked about earlier like Hey, we just forklifted 4,000 people to Citrix VDI and, and you know, we, we had a zombie shift on for four or five days, but we got it up and running. You know, one of the things where we’re helping companies is before this whole coven came around is helping companies say, Hey, you’re looking at VDI. But that conversation started as more of a business continuity plan. Like, Hey, how are you going to support your 4,000 users if you have to support remote from home? And if you only have one data center or you, you have two data centers, you have to buy everything twice and that gets expensive. There are plenty of providers out there that can help do VDI as a service in a model that’s more scalable, that’s easy to, easier to implement rather than running a fire drill and probably more cost effective than buying everything on prem and and managing it yourself.
So putting it in the companies, so putting it in the cloud and then having a Azure, I have a brownout right. Something, stuff like that. I had to, I had to, sorry, Jason’s all where you want the choke point to be. Right, right, right. See you understand this now. I’m so good. I’m so proud right now. Joe, you load balance across two different sets. You’ve like, you’ve thrown so much shade and blown like so much smoke at me for like the last 20 years and you’re like, you’re just finally dipping your toe in the water of the hell. That is my life. And like it just, just to see that little light bulb come on above your head is just that. It’s so gratifying. Leave me alone. Leave me alone. So I guess, so what, what is the answer, Jason? Is it a, is it a math problem? Is it a ease of use problem, I guess? Does it, does it depend on who the customer is?
Well, it depends on the customer’s goals, right? And those goals are probably shifting with the current state of affairs. But before we got to today, you know, I’m talking to clients about, you know, business continuity plans, talking to them about are you trying to save overhead? Are you trying to be more scalable? Are you trying to be more competitive in the marketplace? Now let us give you some ideas on how you can be leveraging technology to account to accomplish that. Right? So in companies for the most part are not in the data center. They don’t care about the data centers, they care about their applications, their mission, critical applications that they’re always running, that their end users can always access them and they don’t care where they live, whether it’s cloud based data center, whether it’s an on prem data center. So we’re going to come in, talk to the clients about, okay, your, your voice is mission critical, right?
The phone system has to be up in your world. That contact center is just beyond important. If those agents aren’t flagging the calls, you know, we’re losing revenue. So talking to companies and saying, well, you know, instead of maintaining two data centers, maybe you can invest some of that money into moving to a contact center as a cloud offering or a hosted voice solution. Or Hey, maybe we can get you off that expensive MPLS network, put in some, uh, an SUV type solution that is going to let you use that money in a more, uh, strategic manner, right? So let’s invest in the technologies that are right for you that our council, many of your initiatives and, uh, show you how to get there. And again, it’s our job to tell you not only who can do it, but who can do it well. Um, we’re agnostic. We don’t have any quotas. We don’t have any B to B partnerships, but we’ve been doing this long enough to where we, after a couple of quick conversations, we can probably help you create a short list really, really quickly. And then once we get those vendors identified, why we think they’re a good fit for you, we have on the client’s side of the table and we interviewed them with you. Right? So we’ll, we’ll hold their feet to the fire in front of you.
Yeah. Cause that’s the big thing that we’re seeing now too, is okay, great, we’re sending a workforce home that’s never been home before. And now how do we hold everyone accountable? So now we’re putting together action plans of, okay, we’re still having 10 30 huddle, we’re doing it though via, you know, via a go to meeting. We’re still on teams two to four with our chat boxes, you know, communicating outages and whatever else is going on. We’re still using, you know this for that. You know what I mean? We’re still using our tools, but now it’s like we have to, we had to redefine our work day. Um, and I think that comes, comes along with this as well.
Yeah. And one thing that you touched on there real briefly is the tools that you’re already using, right? So we’re, you know, my team is more than just a bunch of salespeople. We have engineers on staff and when we’re doing our discovery calls and what we’re really trying to get under the hood and understand what do you have in production, what are you trying to accomplish? And we can say, Hey, you know, moving to hosted voice might be a good option for you for a couple of reasons. It will compliment your BC plan. Maybe it’ll help you be more scalable from an OPEX model or what you’re paying for. But if you’re using Microsoft teams right now, you know, we want to know that and we want to tell you, Hey, teams comes into play here and you probably have some options and here are what your options look like. Right. And a lot of companies aren’t aware of that. There’s a lot of marketecture out there where all these companies are saying they can do everything right. And, you know, that’s, that’s not always the case.
No, I mean the, we can do everything as long as it’s one of those three things that we’re good at or, or one of those two things, we get a spiff this quarter. Um, you know, and I guess that’s the thing too, are these vendors are tax right now because I mean, I was texting, uh, one of our vendors is Sunday cause I know the guy and I go, your shit sucks at broke. Make it make fix. Like I was like speaking like masterblaster and mad max and he’s like, we got guys on in Monday morning. Oh no, not Monday morning now. Like, you know, I guess, um, you know, I’ve, I’ve turned into that, that, that, you know, that demanding customer I guess. Again, I’m so happy right now. This is so beautiful. I loving this idea. How are the vendors, uh, how are the vendors keeping up? Cause you’re right in the middle of both where you’re right in the middle of me and the vendors. You know what I mean?
It’s a great question. And like you said, right now, everyone’s hair’s on fire. They’re either trying to get business, um, or they’re trying to salvage business. You know, a lot of companies, deals that were in flight might be falling by the wayside. Um, other deals are popping up out of nowhere because people have a fire drill and at the end of the day, you know, that vendor management that is a really good area where we’re carrying the torch for our, for our clients because it’s my job to go out and network with all these people and meet the vendors and actually understand what their products consist of and what’s real world and what’s might not be fully baked. What, where’s the paint still went in the car and on what they’re telling them, talking to clients about. So it’s my job to meet with those vendors. So like you’ve got Chuck urban over one, two, three men then on your show. I love Chuck. I love everything. Once you three minutes doing over there, um, it casts in Thomas. You know, I love working with Kasten. He’s a, he’s on the show all the time. Um, it’s really our job to meet with those guys and, and understand who those eight players are and making sure we’re introducing those to our clients. Um, but I hope that that answers your, your vendor question.
Yeah, no, it’s, it’s almost like, I don’t care that your SC is presales, get his ass down here. Like, you know, you know what I mean? There’s no, there’s no room for, for saying no at this point. Uh, it’s really, you know, cause we’re on phone with tech, we’ll tax out and God knows in Colorado, you know what I mean? Like I know there’s evil bodies here. You get them over here, you know, and I think most of them are accommodating enough for like, yeah. All right. You know? Um, but it’s, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a tough thing to juggle.
Well, there’s also another cuff Tuft component to it. So it’s, companies are starting to take on these new projects, right. And they’re starting the evaluation period. You know, if they just pick up the phone and they call the top three hosted voice vendors or cybersecurity vendors that they, there’s just name recognition, they’re going to get four sales pitches and they’re probably all going to be high pressure sales pitches. You know, what can we do get done in Q2 and yes, our stuff is perfect and all of that good.
Yeah. All integrate seamlessly.
Bob. Bob, you worked for an OEM, you were an account rep over there. You’ve been an account rep in a number of places. We’ve crossed paths. I’ve been an account rep at an OEM, I’ve been an account rep at a VAR. I’ve been an engineer for over 10 years. So we have the skill set that when we bring the vendors in that we’re going to give them the Heisman and basically say, don’t give this guy a high pressure sales pitch. You’re going to come in here, you’re going to have 80% of the information that you need. Um, so you can hit the ground running from a conversation standpoint and we can really focus our time and energy on developing a good solution. And if it’s not going to get there and well, it’s not going to get there and we’re going to find out real quickly. But at the end of the day, our companies don’t have the cycles to do all of this research and analysis and that’s where we’re really bringing the value. So we want to compliment that kind of sales pro process or that campaign, but, or that solution design is probably a better way to put it. Um, but we want to make sure our clients are not getting that high pressure sales pitch from four different, you know, sales reps. I’ll try to make that Q two number.
I got, I got to tell a couple of stories offline. I’ve gotten to twice in the last two weeks. Like, I can smell, you’re like, like, I almost want to send a note back. And I’m like, no, don’t, don’t be mean to them, Bob. And I’m like, God, this bullshit. What? He’s this pressure. It’s all the things that you swore you’d never do. Yeah, yeah. No, but I mean, honestly, it’s no different than a company hiring a headhunter to, you know what? I don’t want to Wade through 1200 resumes. I want you to find me the two or three that I absolutely positively need to be talking to and then I’ll take it from there.
That’s it. Exactly. That’s a great analogy. We’ve got the battle scars, we’ve got the experience, we’ve got a whole plethora of tools that we offer to our clients that they can use that really compare solutions and vendors side by side. And we use it as a jumping off, jumping off point. We’ve, we’ve got to add some real world for context to this. Um, you know, other analogies I’ve heard of are being that buyer’s agent for technology. Everyone’s worked with a real estate agent before. Uh, having a buyer’s agent on your side that’s able to really help you find the house you’re looking for in the school district you want, you know, that’s, that’s another analogy.
Yeah. Let them do the work for you. So, I mean, let, let’s let you know, take this to the next level. I mean, Taylor, I don’t know you to jump in on this too. Um, tips for working at home. Like, do you, you know, we always tell people, like the joke was on Fridays I would wear a dress shirt and basketball shorts or, or just under puppy honest, you called them risky business Fridays. Cause if you’re on WebEx and then, you know, you’re on. But like, do you know, like I heard stories today, like I’m on the couch with a TV, a TV dinner tray, Randy, um, lets me, you know, like, I guess, are you, are you talking to customers? Like, you know, here’s the thing, like, you know, how do you tell a thousand people on how to work? Like everyone’s house is different. Some, I might have kids, some might have, you know what I mean? Uh, I guess what’s some tips from you, from your side you to, to be productive when you’re, when you’re, when you are at home?
Jason, I’ll let you kick it off for slip floor.
You, you, you jump in there.
Okay. So my background really quick, I actually came from corporate America, so I was nine to five at a desk or seven, right? Had a login every time I was putting my hours in. Uh, so once I joined C3 it was a hundred percent remote, a percent cloud base. It was, which is great, but also scary at the same time being, I’ve never had that opportunity. So definitely learning some tips and tricks. And one of those being is just finding your own personal space. So it could be on the couch with a TV tray, it could be in your bedroom. Maybe you’re, you know, locking yourself with a dresser and you just have a high school. It doesn’t matter. But one of the most biggest tips and tricks is definitely sticking to a schedule. Um, so one thing is just, Oh Hey, let me get up. Oh, I have to shower, I should actually brush my hair and tell you what video conferencing they can tell if you did not get dressed in that can tell if you did not brush your hair, put makeup on. So I will say it’s everyone. You’re not hiding anything.
Bang. We can see there’s something wrong with my candidate ad and I dunno, I think it’s shorted out like, am I stupid kids spilled something on it. I heard a few, I heard a few today to go. I think a few of the people didn’t realize their camera was on.
Yeah, knock on wood. I’m sure I probably have been off mute a couple of times. Cursing in the background about something. But um, another great tip and trick though is if you can just find a place with a door. And again, if you have kids, I don’t fortunately have kids. I have a dog. It’s hard enough. Um, but again, just being able to shut the door, keeping away all those distractions, uh, it just lets them know, Hey, like mom and dad just need to work. We need to just have a quick separation. And obviously with the kids it’s a little bit harder, uh, but trying to get and give them tasks or something to do around the house or go play [inaudible]
the neighborhood did, I loved the meme that was floating around with the dad laying down, sleeping on the couch and other kids like laying on the floor drawing. And it was like, you know, dad challenged the kids to draw him in color and sketch him appropriately. Just so we could have like an hour now. Well that was not, that was the hardest conversation for me. I was home-based for 15 years and I was like, I’m here but I’m not here. Like you need to understand I’m here but I’m not here. I don’t letting a lot of fun. I know, I know I’m playing call of duty right now, but I’m still not here. Age of empires,
important thing that I can at least explain to anyone is learn how to decompress. Especially again, not knowing what is going to happen with coven 19 whatever we want to call this. Um, it’s just understanding if we’re not able to get out of the house, we’re not able to go do your normal things. Like go to the bar, go see your friends, whatever. You definitely need to find a way to decompress, even though it’s not going to be okay.
Like, I am a social creature, I’m going to have issues. But no,
definitely ways around it though. Again, I’m not gonna lie. I have an adult coloring book and I just sit there and drink wine and watch. You’re going to laugh mask singers or the famous [inaudible]
we’ve, we’ve talked about the terrible furry porn karaoke hit us. That’s why I had to bring this up. I know, like I, I’m convinced I’m gonna wind up having to fire up my bar if I got my laptop and a and a and cam at like sitting downstairs in my basement of my bar and just like invite everyone to a group chat cause I’m just like, look, we all need to be at a bar together. We can’t. So let’s all be at a bar together. Let’s open a speakeasy dude, my basement is ready. I got a kegerator I’ll join. Hey. And my bar’s better stock than most bars. I was one of those crazy people, but I was in the alcohol Island, not the toilet paper aisle. So yeah. So, Hey Jason, is it too late to, uh, I don’t want to, it’s never too late. I’m setting you up for a softball here at work with me. Is it too late? Is it too late to talk to you guys? Cause, I mean, with all the bands going on right now, are people still scrambling or is everybody up there, their ducks in a row or what have you seen?
Oh yeah. I don’t think, uh, people that had their ducks in the row, there’s fewer of them than there are of everyone else. Right. And you know, a common conversation is this is, this isn’t necessarily a catalyst. This is a project that companies have been talking about, you know, um, and doing the remote user doing SD when and where SD Wayne kind of comes into play is there are some remote user capabilities and functionality or some cybersecurity, uh, concerns. Uh, these are projects that people have been kicking around for six months, maybe a year. And now it’s like, Hey, we, we either got, you know, poop or get off the pot. Um,
that’s not really in our budget this year. That’s not really in our budget this year. Oh shit. Suddenly it’s in our budget this year. Yep.
Hey, we didn’t have the budget until we got that. And then it’s like, Oh wow, poof. Now we have budget.
Look, here’s suddenly one point $5 trillion for wall street. Yeah, there wasn’t again.
So I mean, if a, if a company’s looking at, Hey, our contact center agents can’t work from home and the government is forcing our employees to work from home, they’re going, you got to find the budget. Right. And, um, yeah, it’s just a reality of the situation. So from a bandwidth perspective, you know, over at C3 there’s 16 of us, this is what we do all day, every day. Um, I, I love the team. We’ve got a rock star team over there. Uh, we’re, we’re more than happy to take a phone call to field a couple emails and you know, if we can help, that’s, that’s honestly what we’re here for. Um, I will make a, uh, a quick plug on, you know, my, why, why I do this is because before, when I was an OEM reps, you know, the OEM I repped everything was a greatest right by that storage company.
And when I worked for that quarter route switch company that does a lot of UC and security, I had to say, you know, they were the greatest thing since sliced bread. Now I can come in, I can agnostically say, you know, these are your top options. This is who I think is the best fit, but let’s figure it out together. Right. And I’m not going to lie to you, I sleep better at night knowing that, knowing that I’m not working under the quota, I’m not working under a high pressure sales environment. It’s just, it’s such a, it’s an easier place to work. It’s a, it’s a fun environment and it’s, if you love technology, uh, every day is, is pretty exciting.
Well, yeah, I mean when you’re,
when you can actually have your allegiance to truly finding the best in breed as opposed to whatever flag you happen to be waving at the time, I think that makes all the difference in the world.
Definitely. Definitely. Uh, yeah. And as we have those conversations with clients, you know it at first they’re, they’re a little skeptical. As I would be like, wait a minute, hold on. Here. You’re, you’re agnostic. You sure you don’t have a B2B partnership? You sure you don’t have a quota. But after we go through the process or we get through it into a little bit, man, you see this light bulb moment, you see the clients kind of relax, the shoulders dip down a little bit and they’re like, this is great. I wish I met you guys two, three years ago.
Very cool. You’re only pushing them because Cisco pays you more. It come up now. I know it’s not
the end of July.
Nice. Is it the end of quarter now? Nice. Hey Taylor, take us home. How do we, uh, how do we get ahold of you guys? How do we find you online?
Yeah, definitely. So we have a couple of great websites. So to kick things off, we have our C3 tech advisors.com backslash work from home. So it has some more tips and tricks on remote work and then also has a little bit more strategy behind it too and to make sure that you’re ready for your network, your UCAS solutions and then also your security solutions. But you can also follow us on LinkedIn at C3 technology advisors. And I saw you guys tagged us on Twitter, so I appreciate that at a C tech advisors. Hey man, I already retweeted and everything so we’re good. So on any of those channels, feel free to reach out to us. Again, we are again working hard, making sure everyone’s up and running. Cause obviously, you know, we’re a small business to say the least. Obviously we don’t feel like a small business, but we don’t want to see anyone.
You know, we ended up, I mean just to show lack of preparedness, everybody jokes about like, you know, the toilet paper Isles and that kind of stuff. Now, um, somebody posted a picture earlier from best buy, literally every compute, every laptop was gone. Uh, webcams on Amazon. Like the $50 ones that was up here in the studio were listed for 155 before they just sold out. I mean, these are, they’re not $50 where people were walking in nine twenties. They’re the nine 22. So whatever people were walking in on Saturday and Sunday with Blab deps they just bought by the dozens. I’ve never seen anything like it. We’ve never had a laptop at home. So now I have to have one. So work like that’s nuts.
I’m sorry a shirt though. Yeah. We just don’t want to see any businesses implode to just because they’re not ready. So that’s really our main goal.
No good. Very, very tightly. I have this, this literally could not have worked out any better. No doubt. Jason. Uh, we’re going to cut you loose, but appreciate it. Hope you feel better. All the best of the fam. I hope they feel better too on thank you for the great content. We appreciate you.
Really appreciate it guys. Thanks for having us on the show, Dave. Hope that, uh, your leg gets a little better over there, buddy.
No, that’s, that’s Bob. You know the difference between those.
Sorry Bob.
Oh good. I hope to like brush up there, man. I’m the one with the social anxiety and drinking problem. Bob’s the one on crutches, but Hey, we’re going to cut you guys loose. Appreciate it. C3 tech advisors. Um, we’re going to wrap things up for this episode three 39 here of the it and the D show I like to think of is to print and capital one for keeping the lights on. On behalf of Bob, Dave and Randy, do us all a favor. Drink up your drinks, get your phone numbers. You don’t get to go home. You just got to get the hell outta here. See you next week. Drive careful. Stay stave, wash your hands and beat it.
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